Episode 9: Ann Swidler on HIV/AIDS Altruism in Malawi

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, I sit down with UC-Berkeley Sociologist Ann Swidler to learn from her more than two decades of experience studying the aid industry, global health, culture, and institutions in Malawi amid the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  

Transcript

Global Health Politics Podcast Episode 9: Conversation with Ann Swidler

SPEAKERS

Joseph Harris, Ann Swidler

Joseph Harris  00:00

Welcome to the Global Health Politics Podcast, where we go beyond the articles and books, and have real intimate conversations with people working in the field of global health today. I'm your host, Joseph Harris. Today, I'm really pleased to be here with Dr. Ann Swidler, Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a sociologist of culture, religion and institutions. She is co-author of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, and author of Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Her similar article, "Culture in Action", which was a favorite of mine in graduate school, invites us to think about culture as a toolkit and has been cited more than 12,000 times. In the last decade...In the last two decades, excuse me, she's turned her attention to global health and the role of NGOs in the AIDS pandemic in Africa, penning A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa, with Susan Cotts Watkins and a widely cited article on Meaning and Condom use in Rural Malawi with Iddo Tavory along with several other articles.  Thanks for coming to speak today at the Global Health Politics Workshop and for joining the Global Health Politics Podcast. So your landmark contributions have helped provide sociologists with important new ways of thinking about and understanding culture, religion, and institutions. What drew you to study these issues originally?

Ann Swidler  01:44

Oh, if I, you know, there's going back before my African interests. I, you know, I think this was really, in some ways primordial in my thinking. I just wrote an autobiographical essay for the annual review of sociology. And first of all, my father was an attorney with the Tennessee Valley Authority, so the New Deal loomed incredibly large in my childhood. We had a picture of Frank Norris, who was the senator who pushed through the TVA legislation, and of Franklin Roosevelt on our walls as kids. So I think I always took for granted that governance mattered and that institutions that could provide governance were incredibly important.  And then in graduate school, I got fascinated by culture and labor and all sorts of problems about culture and religion, but I was always interested in the intersection between institutions and culture in one way or another. And I think I try, it's sort of like a, you know, these things are interrelated, but you sort of approach it from one angle, and then you approach it from another angle, and then you approach it from another angle, and then, of course, getting the opportunity to work on habits of the heart really crystallized for me the idea that you can't have good institutions without the cultural surround that makes them work. And likewise, you can't have good culture without institutions that help sustain its meanings and make them real for people. And the book you didn't mention here, but the same co-authors, (so Bellah, Madsden, Sullivan, with Tipton) also wrote The Good Society, and, oh, maybe it is there. And the research I did for that, it's funny, I interviewed people in Washington, DC about, actually, the value of a human life. And I talked to people to EPA and at OSHA.  But somehow, talking to these were mainly economists who worked on the actual, you know, technique for measuring the value of the human life, which then played a big role in the cost benefit analysis they were forced to do before any regulation could be enacted. And I remember this guy explaining to me that how you calculate how much people value something depends partly on whether they have had an experience of that thing. And he used the example of the national parks. And he said that when they do surveys, it turns out that people, even if you show them, that you could manage the parks more economically and there could be better facilities, they do not want private companies to manage the national parks. They want the national parks managed in the public interest by government, because they see them as belonging to everyone. But his point was that if this was not already in place, if we did not have parks that were managed. Managed publicly, people wouldn't be able to value that. That's not something they are born with. You know, five utilitarian needs, and one of them is to have publicly managed national parks. It's the institutional reality that this already exists as a possibility that makes it possible, for people to, in the way economists can measure, put a value on that. So I think it that kind of helped me realize that, Oh my God, even valuations themselves are deeply embedded in the cultural understanding of institutional experience. So I think that has been part of my thinking from I guess I'd say.

Joseph Harris  05:49

Well, you mentioned that work being situated in the US, but you've also written about other places very far away. What led you to do research on Africa, and also to get involved in research related to global health?

Ann Swidler  06:03

And this is a medicine to help prevent transmission to pregnancy.  Yeah, well, this is actually a very good demonstration of sort of continuity, despite the apparent massive discontinuity. First, I have to give credit to having tenure. There's nothing like it. It's a really important feature of academic careers. So in 2000, I had just finished Talk of Love. It was actually published in 2001 and I got a call and letter and so forth from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. And it is an amazing place. And at that time, they were offering the friend who had told me about this, and you're going to get a call from them and don't say no, he said they're going to invite you to a meeting and do not say no, because they can buy a huge amount of your time. Wonderful. I went to this meeting, and it turned out that they were basically auditioning people to see whether they could put together a group that would answer a question that their earlier groups had started stumbling against. They had a group in population health and a group in child development, and those groups had gone to work together, and they had come up with their understanding of what policies improved population health and improved child development, basically reducing inequality, won't be surprised to hear, and then it occurred to them that they had no idea how you got to societies that would actually produce that outcome, that just can come up with all sorts of diagnoses, but what kind of society is actually going to get you there? So they were auditioning me based on the Habits of the Heart, I'm sure, and I think they had invited all sorts of other bright lights, you know, Michael Ignatieff, and Craig Calhoun, people who write about big things, but I was the one who had a friend who had said, "Don't say no. You've never heard of this organization, but believe me, this is a really good thing." So I go to this meeting, and there they, I think they sent out a bunch of invitations, and nobody else said yes. And so there were a bunch of Canadians there who had participated in these earlier programs, and because it was such a wonderful thing to do, they were very eager to get another chance to be in this new group that might form. So I waxed eloquently, and I will say I really did about culture and institutions, and how if you wanted certain institutions, culture matter, and so on and so forth. And I basically spent my whole life leading up to this moment. And there was a young woman in the room who had been in the earlier group on population health. She's actually a very important public health researcher. And I did not know her, but, and she said, "Well, we really should focus on health." And I said, "No, we really should focus on cultural institutions." And she said, "health." And I said, "cultural institutions," and she said "health." And then she said: "Look, right now, I have a project in Botswana, giving AZT." So that'll tell you how early it was, before nevirapine, giving AZT to pregnant women. Yes, and she said, "The women were given AZT. It reduces HIV transmission to their infants from 40% to 20%. Nothing could be more important than that," she says. And I just out of my mouth came this amazing sentence, I said, "But isn't the prior question: why Botswana has a program to give AZT to pregnant women and other places don't?" And actually, I had no idea whether other places did or didn't do this, but that kind of won that argument, and I went away from that thinking, I wonder why some places have different kinds of AIDS projects. And I got a map from the UN that showed their clinics that were, you know, I think they were, well at that time, some kind of AIDS clinics. And there were 17 of them sprinkled around Africa. There were, like one in South Africa, one here. And I thought, "How do they decide where to put them?" And so I started to cook up this idea that I would, now it sounds completely insane, but anyway, I was going to map all of Sub-Saharan Africa and think about the kind of collective capacities they have based on their traditional forms of governments. So maybe I was going to get the Murdoch Human Relations Area Files, which have all the anthropological data and geo-coded, and I was going to figure out where you could fight HIV or AIDS. I don't even remember how I thought of them, more effectively in some places than others. I got, actually, some enthusiastic graduate student who was going to teach me ArcView. And so I started, you know, trying to figure out how to study, not just so I think the only work that had been done at that time was, and here I'm going to hurt somebody's feelings, but this sort of anthropological stuff that said: "Oh, this group, you know, the Maasai warriors, go off and live in huts, and they sleep with 13 year old girls, and that spreads HIV; Or this group, you know has same sex relationships among men, and that spreads." That kind of work was being done, kind of behavioral health saying, "Look at the exotic cultural practices of these groups. Oh, these are terrible, they spread HIV." But the political and social question of why some places responded to the challenge of the AIDS epidemic differently than others, and what their sort of community capacities were, and how that might influence their HIV response, that question, I started looking around. There was not a word published. So in the year 2000 there was nothing. And then in 2001 I encountered. I had started just being obsessed, just, you'll have to take my word for it. I was once, once I was galvanized. I thought, "I don't care whether Canadians give me money or not. This is what I want to do." And I just started, you know, moving heaven and earth to try to figure out ways to study this. I had actually four different research ideas, and I got a little bit of grant money from the University of California. And so I was, I was actually moving on multiple fronts at once. And obviously some of the ideas I had did not pan out. I did not use ArcView, I did not geo-code every cultural group. I read this article in 2001 that was great. It's by Catherine Boone, who's a major Africanist and somebody named Batsell was his last name, and she said, "Why aren't political scientists studying AIDS?" And she talked about all these anomalies, that places that you would think had lots of administrative capacity seemed to be doing terribly, and other places that you would think would be basket cases, I think was Zimbabwe she was talking about, were doing really well. And why was this? And nobody was looking so I thought, "Okay, it's not just there are some literatures out there, and I haven't been able to find it. There really isn't a literature." So that just completely solidified my commitment. And the committee who did form, and they don't do this now, so I don't want anybody to get their hopes up. But at that time, they bought out half my time for five years school.

Joseph Harris  07:25

Wow. 

Ann Swidler  14:23

So I actually got two and a half years of leave.

Joseph Harris  14:29

Wow. 

Ann Swidler  14:30

And that allowed me to sort of retool by reading a huge amount of stuff. It allowed me to go places. And I'll just say the last thing which will be important, and in my talk is important and in every aspect of my life, which is I have friends who know people I don't know. And it turned out that my colleague, roommate, is a major power in global health. She runs an organization called Gynuity, spelled "G, y, n, u, i, t, y" that has played the major role in medical abortion globally, and she does a whole bunch of other projects.  Anyway, it's called Gynuity health projects, and she's the one who got me invited to a meeting in Botswana in 2003 so I found out about it, but I said, "Do you know the person running?" She said, "Of course, I know her." So I wrote her, and I said, "My friend's name is Beverly Winikoff. Beverly Winikoff said I could contact you and get an invitation to this meeting. And blah, blah, blah." And so I started interviewing everybody I could find in the United States at that time who worked on the ground in AIDS projects in Africa, and I was specifically not interested. And have really remained kind of, I've done a lot of it, but I've remained kind of allergic to going into the national AIDS commission, and getting the usual line of BS from whoever I'm talking to, and hearing the kind of official government story and things. And I really wasn't interested in that, but I was interested in what people who were actually trying to get things done on the ground had experienced. And I guess I'll stop there, and we'll say the first few things I published in 2006 seven and eight were based on that research. I ended up interviewing, I think, 80 plus people who had done and they were mostly American volunteers, although I interviewed a few Africans who had started NGOs back home, or happened to be visiting the US, and they represented some Ugandan NGOs who I wasn't picky about where they had been. I wasn't focused on one country, but that's the answer, which is, I thought it was great place to study the interaction of culture and institutions. I guess I want to put in a footnote, which is the big question I was asking, which is, why did some places in Africa respond more effectively to the AIDS epidemic than others did? I certainly never answered that question, but I think the brilliant book that comes closest to answering is by Evan Lieberman, what's called Boundaries of Contagion, and that book, which I think came out in 2007, if I'm right, that is an amazing effort and much more systematic and data rich than anything I could have done. And it comes closer than anything else we have to answer that big continent, by subcontinent, by profession. 

Joseph Harris  17:44

Well, agreed, that's a tremendous book, and was certainly a an incredible inspiration in my work and the backstory you just shared. I think a lot of people will be unfamiliar with it and really excited and to learn about it, because I think it helps us to understand your work even even more. 

Ann Swidler  18:01

Well, Thank you. 

Joseph Harris  18:03

So let me talk a little bit about that, some of the work that you did, after all that you just shared, you have this wonderful article on condom semiotics in Malawi that was published in the American Sociological Review, one of the top journals in the field, and it's one of a very small number of articles on Africa or on HIV/AIDS to be published in one of the disciplines, top journals. What do you make of that? And why hasn't there been more research on HIV/AIDS or on Africa within American sociology?

Ann Swidler  18:36

Well, I would say, first of all, I think the amount of work published in major journals on Africa has grown slightly. So I think in 2002 or three or something, Nicole Beisel and Francis Dodoo published a very short article,saying, why don't sociologists study Africa. It was, it was like two pages, and maybe it was published in the American sociologist or something. And they really were saying, look, there is nothing. I think they actually did some systematic survey of the journals and said this is outrageous, but I would point to work like Maggie Frye's work and Jenny Trinitapoli's work. These are both Malawi people, and they have both done brilliant work, and they have gotten published in the top journals, not just demography journals where it was always more plausible work on Africa published, but you know, Maggie Frye's 2012 article in AJS, the other top journal in the field, on Bright Futures in Malawi's New Dawn is just a theoretical tour de force, and it's based on, you know, very rich qualitative interviews from Malawi. And then Jenny has done paper after paper with paper and so forth. So I think there's a little more work, but I don't think it's actually the journals. I think it's a broader problem, which is that American sociology is basically interested in America and the kind of self absorption is really astounding. And then we're interested briefly in other countries, when they directly intersect issues of American ideology or American interests, or something, so I used to say very bitterly. So here I'm just supporting what you were saying. You know, you're much more likely to have a major research program on Poland, and it's post Soviet experience, or Czechoslovakia. Now it's Czech Republic. But anyway, because we were fascinated by, you know, post-Soviet and the transition to market economies and how market economies work. And, you know, there'll be 20 more papers published on Poland than on the whole continent of Africa. So I basically agree with you that it's a huge problem, but I don't think it's something like we need people on that editorial board to be more sympathetic to, you know, wonderful research on Africa. I actually think its discipline as a whole has kind of abandoned Africa. So there was this swell of excitement about an interest in Africa in the 1960s when decolonization happened, and development scholars thought, Ah, it's the future, you know, that went and studied Tanzania, this place, and then when it looked like that, whole vision of the future just crashed, and Africa was going nowhere. Basically, people just lost interest. So if you look at the number of departments, a self-respecting sociology department, let's say, will have a Latin Americanist, and they almost certainly will have a China scholar, if they can afford one. Maybe they will have a Russia scholar, or post Soviet Union scholar, somebody who studies Tajikistan or something, but knows Russian and knows literature on the Soviet Union and Russia, there are no Africans left, almost none. I think even people like me or like Jenny or like Maggie, they're not hired as because the Department says, we need an Africanist. They're hired because they manage to make such brilliant, broad theoretical contributions that that's you have people like Ching Kwan Lee at UCLA, and she is really a broadly saying, a China scholar, but she's done now serious work on the Chinese intrusion in Africa. So she's kind of inadvertently, let's say, or I mean, she chose to do it, but it's because she's interested in how Chinese business interests, you know, try to penetrate African societies. So people do it as sort of incidentally, but they're not trained Africanist as I am now. And I think even if you were to look at area studies, money, language training under Title Six, just a tiny fraction of it goes to Africa. So I think it's a broader, more systemic problem, but I agree with you, it's a really serious problem.

Joseph Harris  23:47

Your article on condom semiotics makes some really important theoretical contributions, but it's also has some really important practical ramifications on HIV/AIDS prevention work showing how, for example, people sometimes enact unsafe sex to signal that they aren't associated with an unsafe social category. What do you consider to be that paper's most important implication, and did the publication of it lead to any conversations with practitioners doing work on HIV/AIDS providers.

Ann Swidler  24:23

It's easy to answer the second question, which is not not a word, no one has ever noticed it. Come to talk to me, come to talk to Iddo. That just has not happened. So unfortunately, it should happen, but it hasn't. I also want to say recite this, but there is a woman. I've never met her at home. She is but there's a woman named Elise. I think it's Elise who published a kind of roughly similar argument about African American or, I actually can't remember if it was in Britain or in the US. I have some sense this person may be British. So that would be another source you could look at if you wanted to see similar arguments kind of generalized across more groups or more situations. I think the article is really important in two ways.  And one is, and I will just insist on the importance of this, that what we call semiotic codes, and just a little parenthesis, I really like it that we talk about this fancy language of semiotics, and we do it in very straightforward, down to earth ways, so you don't have to go out and read all sorts of obscure French thinkers to appreciate the argument, but what we're saying is that a lot of people's behavior is shaped by how they know their behavior, their attitudes, and even their inner experience will be read by others. And that's not the same as saying, "Oh, you want to conform to the norms." No, no in in semiotic codes, just very simply, if you walk by someone and don't shake that person's hand, that says something, whether you mean it or not, you might have just hurt your hand and have it in your pocket because your pinky is sore, but it will be read as a gesture of hostility. And so semiotic codes surround us with a language that we are speaking whether we want to or not, and not being misread in those languages is just vital. So I think there are all sorts of other domains in which this is very, very important. I talk about in Talk of Love, both something as broad as our notions of gender. So if you have a world in which there are people who identify as male, who think that to be male, you need to be mean and tough and hit people, a lot more people will be mean and tough and hit people. And if that gets recoded so that masculine is to not be insecure about your identity, but to be able to be nurturant and tenderly hold the baby and be gentle, people may not change how much they value a male identity, and they may not change their inner desires to be a certain kind of person, but they are very, very likely to change their behavior to be read not as macho and sort of overdoing masculinity because they're insecure about it, for example, strutting around and to be read as securely masculine and ditto and even more so for what it means to be to identify as a woman and to be female or feminine, which used to mean being kind of helpless and dumb. And increasingly, you see this in movies and things. It means being tough. Sometimes it means being eager to have sex without any rules. It means being self assertive, and so, you know, you can think of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, one of my favorite movies, where the nurture mother figure ends up, you know, with huge machine guns and locked into this, I mean, she ends up destroying this monster in order to save a little girl. So, so, and actually, that movie very consciously plays with these gender codes, so the female character has to rescue her male partner, not vice versa. So there are strong semiotic reconfiguring. Anybody whose a generation that never seen that movie, It's fantastic. Make it the core of a class on gender. It's just amazing. So anyway, I guess I think that's the broad theoretical point, and that we tend to study culture as if it had to be something deep inside people that you learn, you know, with your mother's milk. And I actually think that's just the wrong way to think about so I don't think semiotic codes are the only level at which culture operates, but they were central feature of culture and cultural change that is just neglected.  And then at the practical level, you asked me about what I think the implications are for global health. And maybe this links a little bit to my talk today, which is, you know, if I had to summarize my whole approach in one sense, I would say: don't go trying to transform lives of people in places you know nothing about. That I guess is my strongest, you know, after the 20 years of research I've done in Africa, I just have such a sense of people's total willingness to say, "We're going to empower African women. We're going to, you know, do this and that." They they have no idea what they're talking about. If you've met African women that they may need resources, they may need legal changes, but they do not need you, especially you 24-year old, recent college graduate with her or his head full of bubbles to empower them. So I just think it's so that would be the big, big picture, and then, more specifically, with things like condoms, that when you are introducing a public health campaign of some sort, and that's one of the major things we do, you do want to think about how the way you're framing your public health intervention will be read locally and saying, HIV is terribly dangerous, and condoms are a way to protect yourself against dangerous, terrible people. Then somebody who is in bed with somebody and saying, "I love you, I love you," if she or he takes out a condom and says, I want to have safe sex. That will be read partly because of the public health campaign that promoted condoms. It will be read as you think I am dangerous and bad and they're going to infect you. And it's very, very hard to be sending that signal to someone in the middle of a sexual encounter. And you could do it together beforehand, if there were a lot of trust and understanding. So you could recode the meaning. You could say, "It's because we love each other, that we are going to keep each other safe."  And actually, I wrote one article which was published in this maybe an Institute for Advanced Research created something somewhat embarrassingly called the successful societies program, basically directed by Michelle Lamont at Harvard and Peter Hall in Political Science and Government at Harvard, and they published, and by now I dropped out after 10 years, that was enough flying to Toronto, but they published two quite good edit volumes. In the first one, I published an article on some of these issues, and I end by talking about the HIV epidemic in the US, among men who have sex with men. At that time, I called them gay men, so the language changes. That's one of the interesting features of global public health, as you know, is the buzzword, sure, but I made the point that the global public health community drew lessons from the very successful behavioral change programs in the US and, I guess, Europe and Australia, and they thought that They would just export those lessons, which basically became abstain, be faithful, condomized, ABCs, and they would move that over to Africa. And that, that was what they thought had worked, and they completely missed that the campaign to practice Safe sex in the US was part of a powerful high solidarity movement by gay men and actually lesbians as well. So the whole What's now LGBTQIA  community + and that it was that sense of solidarity. It was because you loved other men that you were going to protect them. The message was not: I'm afraid, I'm going to protect myself. You're dangerous. I hate you. The message was just the opposite. It was a sign of your political, I would use this term in a positive way, It was a sign of your political correctness that you used the condom. That was how you showed you were really part of the gay community and on the right side.  And so it was like the behavioral techniques were exported, but the underlying moral vision that made that thing work was not exported. And that moral vision, by the way, is kind of faded, and the behavioral things you need to do to protect yourself have not lasted. That is, the subsequent pattern was very, very different. And I would say condom use probably extremely low, but thank goodness there is effective ART and now there's prep. But I think that the degree to which what that condom use signal and the larger moral vision within which signaling that made a difference. So even if you knew sex would not be as much fun with a condom, it was a good thing to do. It's a little bit the way wearing a mask or not feels for us that we feel: look wearing the mask shows you are conscientious person who cares about the well-being of others and knows what's what. So even as mask use has dropped away for most people. I'm not wearing a mask with you, but normally I am quite careful, and it's, it's not really. I mean, I've had COVID once, and I probably will get it again. And I'm vaccinated as much as you can be vaccinated, and I'm not terribly worried about it, but it's sort of a moral signaling, a virtue signaling thing. I think it's virtuous to wear a mask in public settings, and I try to do that even when I'm the only one doing it.

Joseph Harris  36:41

For me as well. Since the publication of your early articles on Africa, including the one on condoms semiotics, other scholars have made important contributions in this area, and I think about work like Sanyu Mojola's great book "love, money and HIV", which directs our attention to the ways in which a desire to appear modern can lead educated young women into situations that put them at risk for HIV/AIDS. How has Sanyu's work and that of other scholars like Terry McDonald influenced your thinking about HIV and culture?

Ann Swidler  37:20

So let me say I really appreciate both those books, and I love Sanyu and her work, and I love Terry and his work. Influence is a little harder question. So I find Terry's stuff on the materiality of the AIDS response. I mean, in one way, it's very, very similar to the way I've been talking about things here, which is, the people who design these things don't have much sense of how they will actually work on the ground. So they don't realize that the red in their signs is going to fade, or that people can't see the signage as they but, and I think Sanyu is absolutely right, and in that way, you know, she's talking about a different kind of semiotics. And it always had struck me again that we had imposed a very American understanding in which suffering from diseases was going to be related to poverty and inequality, and, you know, limited life opportunities, and we were going to do things that sounded good to us, like offer young women training in tailoring or some other life skill that would get them out of poverty so they wouldn't have to trade sex for support. They wouldn't have to practice survival sex. Well, I think Sanyu may not say this as bluntly as I would, but actually, it turned out, if you looked at the data on HIV, that the wealthier and more educated you were, the more likely you were to be HIV positive. And if, if preventing HIV transmission, or your only goal in life, which it's not women should stay backward in their villages, get as little education as possible, and be under their surveillance of their relatives all the time so they wouldn't be tempted to have sex with people they weren't married to. And even new, new work by Jenny Trinitapoli is showing that the more times you divorce and remarry, that's really the critical moment at which HIV tips, so it's relationship instability. So women becoming more ambitious and going to the big city and getting wealthier, they get more ambitious, and they want to be more wealthy. And then these are, here I'm going to get myself in such trouble, but I'll just say they are normal African practices, and they are more likely to have a boyfriend who gives them support, maybe, to have sex with their boss, maybe. And so it is not clear at all that educating and empowering and so forth women prevents HIV. Now, what it does if you ask those women what they want, they want more education. They want a chance to move to the city. They want, you know, more credentials. They want more opportunity. So I am all for programs that, "empower women", that make them give them more economic opportunity and give them more educational that's what they make incredible sacrifices to educate themselves and their children. So I am in no way saying we should be doing this.  But if you imagine because you're imposing a view of the world in which African women are passive and helpless and they need us to come and teach them to be like us, more egalitarian. That's just does not fit context. And indeed, again, that pattern is starting to shift now, but for the first 20 years, at least, of the epidemic, the more backward and rural you were, the more protected from HIV you were, and that was true for men and women. So poor rural men can't have girlfriends because they can't afford them. They don't have anything to give someone a gift with whom they're having regular sex. So the pattern is not really one night stands. Anyway. It's the traditional pattern that at least in Malawi, which I know pretty well. You know, the traditional pattern is a man provides economic support, and particularly he provides the tasty protein that goes along with the woman's contribution to food, which is the maize meal food, nsima, and she cooks the nsima, and he brings what's called the relish, and she cooks the nsima and raises the children, and they have sex, and those two exchanges, that is a marriage. If you are doing that with somebody, you're basically married to me. Now, men will set up those relations with other women if they can afford to provide similar kinds of support to another woman. And there might be an explosion if the woman 1 finds out, she will try to beat up or get rid of Woman 2, and that's actually quite frequent. Not I mean, I'm sure men beat women up as well, but  we see many, many examples of women attacking other women when they had been morally wronged, and they go after the woman who's trying to take her husband.  So anyway, I would say that Sanyu's book is really good and incredibly insightful. Of course, she knows the situation very, very well and has local languages, which I don't have, but I think that insight that the things we think are good don't always go together, and it's very, very hard to break particularly idealistic young people of notion that if something's good, like, you know, feminist liberation and equality for women, then every result it's related to must also good and that's just not true. In fact, okay, indulge myself. And I really shouldn't do this, but I think so. I have a beloved sister-in-law. She's wonderful, she's brilliant, she's absolutely great. And she's substantially younger than I, and she was involved in one of these very creative, you know, Food for the World-type organizations. And some of you may actually know this project they were bringing so she said, "Oh, I'm actually working on the TV documentary," or whatever related to this program in Malawi. And I said, "No kidding. That's absolutely wonderful. What are they doing?" She said, "Oh, they're teaching men to cook, so they can share cooking with their wives." Okay. I had to basically rush out of the room, and I didn't know whether I was going to break down into hysterical laughter or throw up, and it was the stupidest idea I have ever heard, bar none. The women in Malawi need many, many things. They need not to have their children die. They need more land because population is growing like mad, and their tiny plots of land are getting re-divided in every generation, so they're even tinier. They need fertilizer for their fields. They need men who won't cheat on them. They need opportunities to go to school. They need to not die in childbirth. But the last thing they need on the planet is our little fantasy of men and women cooking.  That sort of takes me to the book of which the subtitle is "The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa." And it's that we project these kind of fantasies about our way of life, which we're convinced is wonderful, perfect, absolutely great, could not be better, and we think that we can just impose that or offer that to people all over the world, not just in Africa, and it will be just great for them. And first of all, it doesn't acknowledge that they live with different institutions than we do, and so our cultural priors just don't make sense for them. And I could elaborate that thought if you wanted, but that's where I'll stop, which is, "Don't give money to a program that wants to teach men and women to cook together in Malawi!" Okay? 

Joseph Harris  46:35

We shouldn't offer messages without understanding the local context. 

Ann Swidler  46:39

Absolutely, absolutely. 

Joseph Harris  46:41

Your book, which you just mentioned, "A Fraught Embrace" with Susan Cotts Watkins, explored the disjuncture between the desires of philanthropists in the US, these fantasies you mentioned, and other countries, villagers in Africa, and the often unseen translational role that local brokers play in AIDS policy and practice. How did that collaboration come about, and did its publication lead to any conversations with development practices?

Ann Swidler  47:08

So this is just the best lucky accident that ever happened. So I'll start right there. Which is I? I published Talk of Love in 2001, and in 2003 Susan Watkins wrote to me, and you would have to know her, but this is so much her character. She wrote, I almost have to use her voice, even though this was an email. But she said, "Well, I read your book and it's terrific, terrific." That's her absolutely favorite word, "but I've got better data than you do. Are you going to be at the ASA Meetings this year." And I said, "Yes, I am going to." She said, "Then I'm coming." So she came to ASA. That was in Atlanta that year, and she wanted me to read these incredible diaries that she had collected. These are the journals that Maggie Frye has used in her work. They're available on the web through the University of Michigan. And you can also find them well. You can find the links to them in the article with Iddo. That's what we drew on as well. And I read these things. They've had various names. You can call them diaries or journals. I think the term for it is conversational journals, but basically, Susan cultivated and trained a number of very bright people among her interviewers. So she had tons of interviews recruited from local villages, and she trained them to remember they had to be very talented, very bright people, which they were, and to write down in notebooks everything they heard during the day had to do with AIDS sex, you know, infidelity, religion, you name it. And this is a repository of local culture that is unmatched. There's really nothing like it anywhere on the planet. It is amazing. So I was completely enthralled by this fascinating remember, I was also already trying to go to Africa. I was had already been to Botswana. Yeah the point I met her, which was August 2003, and she said, "Come to Malawi. And I said, Are you kidding? I'd love to come to Malawi." She said, "Terrific!" And that's how I came. And the key thing there isn't just that it gave me access. And at that point, also she, I remember, she paid, I think I got the money for the travel from Berkeley, but basically she supported me while I was there, and I spent a month, or more than a month with her there, but she had created a really remarkable research project, which is ongoing now at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, I think it's run by Hans-Peter Kohler. And she, with the advice of the Malawian graduate students actually, she chose three rural districts in Malawi. She created an enormous sample. This was money from the population in US NIH, and she recruited interviewers by tacking up little one sheet things on local posts saying, you know, on Tuesday, we are looking for English speaking local people who have a form for diploma, so that's a high school degree, to work for two months as interviewers, and 200 people went up with their little folders, and they interviewed them, first of all to make sure they did understand English. She insisted that they knew the local language, so they had to be basically embedded, and what they were was high school graduates who did not have connections in the big city. So they had made the enormous sacrifices, and they had the enormous brain power it takes to get a high school diploma in Malawi, and then there was nowhere for them to go. So they were still living in villages, still helping their families by hoeing with these short hoes that break your back. That was they were leading village life, but they were desperate to have a way out of the village so that access to a local research setting where you have these tremendously talented people, some of whom did manage to move on and, you know, head up an NGO or get another degree and get work elsewhere, but a lot of them are still around. And so every time, even after Susan stopped going to Malawi, when I go, there's this huge pool of people who are local people.  And the thing I noticed Susan had been doing this since 1998, so when I went 2004 in addition to the people she had hired, other people would show up to show her their children, to thank her, to ask if by any chance she had any books. This one woman who I'm still very, very fond of, who I'm actually going to mention today, the reason I originally knew her is that she came and said, "Do you, do you by any chance have any books?" And I said, "Well, what kind of books?" She said, "Any books?" She said, "I love to read." And so I gave her whatever novels I had brought with me, and she was just incredibly thrilled. And then I think I, one year, brought her one of these women's advice books, Venus and something. It wasn't that one, but it was a similar, and she was just beside herself. She loved this. So, you know, people have their own interests, their own concepts, and to be able to not just be stuck in the capital doing the interviews with, you know, people, I mean some of those, somebody befriends you with and gives you more insight than the average person does. I did a lot of interviewing in Botswana, and published one paper based on that, and that was good, but this kind of embedding in a local, rural situation cannot be matched, and she had paved the way there.  So then she and I turned out to get along incredibly well, and we started noticing, I would say, the core of it was published in 2009. We did this article called "Teach a Man to Fish." And it was basically teaching men to fish is a self deluding ideology. We published it in world, what's it called, the really good Elsevier journal, World Politics or no, it's not called...

Joseph Harris  54:17

World Development?

Ann Swidler  54:18

 World Development, thanks. And it's a really good article. And so we did a bunch of different things. We did a really nice article on transaction sex, arguing that if you really understand it in the context of patron client relations in Malawi, it looks very, very different than it does if you understand it in the kind of Victorian context of "Oh no, a woman has been forced to have sex, terrible, and she's doing it. Oh, she's starving. Otherwise she's just like us we would abhor." Well, that isn't how people think about sex. Because, actually, lots of people say things like, "Gee, why aren't you having sex with anybody?" And the answer is, "Oh, I'm married." You know, "I'm not going to." They said, "That doesn't matter. It's important for your health." If you don't have sex, you'll get sick. So you've got to do, how about that guy? He looks nice. How about him? He looks nice. And you're saying no, no no, no, no, no, no. But so just anyway, being with Susan was absolutely great, and we both disagreed about a number of things. So she was interested in this local gossip as that was what her earlier work had been about. You know that early, she'd shown with European demographic data, that it was probably local gossip and women talking to each other in the 19th century that had spread contraceptive technique and knowledge well before any modern contraceptives were available, and she showed these patterns of fertility decline that could only be explained by sort of local subcultural activity.  So she was interested in documenting similar processes, and I was saying, but we really should focus on these NGOs. And for about the first year, she was just thought they were unimportant because they weren't local, they weren't embedded in the ground. And finally, we kind of merged our understandings by seeing that the interesting problem was why they weren't embedded in the ground, and what was really happening at that intersection between, I would call it the global social imaginary and the local cultural imaginary. And one way to think about that is we got interested in who was colonizing. And there's a little bit of way of thinking about it that while the global AIDS industry and all the I think the other thing we did that most people haven't done is look at all the really tiny NGO groups that come. We would be staying in some obscure motel, and a little church group would show up, and it would be like, you know, from Arkansas or Georgia, or, you know, Maryland or somewhere, and they would be singing tuneless hymns. I remember there was one place where the acoustics were horrible and they were singing, "I want to be a sheep. Sheep, sheep. Sheep are so meek, meek, meek." We would talk to them. We would talk to their pastors. They were there to, you know, help orphans, they would be connected with local pastor. And then we learned partly from wonderful anthropologists who study these things, and partly from talking to pastors, we knew that acquiring the link to one of these foreign groups who could then provide resources to you and your congregation was an incredible asset for them. They were, so to speak, on the hunt for such connections constantly, and actually being able to monopolize such connections and dole them out to local villagers. So what you often got was an urban pastor who had a link to some poor village pastor, and he was the one who mobilized other orphans to show up and look very poor. I mean, they are here, I'm not being sarcastic. They really are very poor. And the woman running program to feed orphans breakfast is probably feeding primarily her own grandchildren because maybe her adult children have died of HIV, a very, very common pattern. And so that pastor brings these church groups to the local pastor, and they get some resources, and the children get some additional maize meal, and maybe fortified maize meal, which is even better. And they get bowls, and the church group brings toys, and they feel enormously fulfilled. So we were studying kind of how the, I don't want to call them fantasies in a bad way. Like one of the points we make early on in the book is that our whole lives are embedded in fantasies. You know, you have children, you're imagining what their futures will be. You get a PhD, and you're imagining that you'll publish the greatest article ever, and you won't. But what, what animates life is fantasy. So I'm not, I mean, you know, everything from good sex to good friendships, our fantasy is really important and maybe sociologically neglected. But I do not mean to dismiss it by saying it's only fantasy, but it also can be...It can lead you not to see, well, first of all, lots of interactions are asymmetric in the sense that what you think you're doing and what they think they're doing, you are managing to meet on common ground. But it's not the same common ground from both points of view. It's a little like maybe gift of Magi, if you know that short story. Okay, so he's trying to do the things she would love most, and she's trying to do the thing he loves the most. He sells his watch in order to buy comb for her hair. She has her hair cut off and sells her hair in order to buy a chain for his watch. So they're, they're loving each other, but in a way that they're kind of, you know, ships in the night, well, it's a little like that. So you have goodwill on both sides.  The Africans are trying to get what they need from the interaction the global actors, both the little, tiny ones who are doing good works as they understand it, and the huge - we call them - the behemoths and butterflies. I believe that was Susan's language. And you know, they're both sides are trying to do what they think is good. It's not necessarily a story of corruption in the bad sense, although there's often quite an actual corruption. But the realm they're meeting on really constricts what can happen. So I think one of the many, I think, wonderful payoffs of our book. But we, we actually, once we realized this, we started combing through documents of all sorts and looking at monitoring and evaluation. We got this in with a woman who worked at, she worked for the World Bank, and she put out these amazing, you know, not monitoring, evaluation, making, write a report, but she had these massive Excel files in 16 different colors that show, you know, 5,487,752 condoms were distributed. And you know, 8,791 people were trained in HIV prevention. And this and that, really huge. And if you really look at most of these projects, the only thing they ended up actually doing was training! Early, early on, when I was just starting in 2000 or whatever it was, I started interviewing anybody I could find who knew anything about anything. So I found this guy who was at Berkeley, probably in the School of Public Health, and he was a friend of a friend. I mean, that was how I was meeting people, and he had worked in some AIDS program in Africa. And I said, "I want to you to tell me all about it. What did you do?" And he said, "Well, I was a trainer of trainers." And I said, "What's that?" So I just never heard the language, you know, it was like there was a whole, whole area of expertise that was completely unfamiliar. And I think it was actually an advantage that if I had gone to a school of public health, if I knew anything, I would have already taken all that for granted, but it was so foreign to me. And I thought, "Wait, you went to Africa to to help with the AIDS epidemic, and you were a trainer of trainers. That sounds kind of pathetic, you know?" I mean, that's what I was kind of thinking. And then you realize that training provides the easiest common ground on which these two massive global AIDS enterprise and you know, people on the ground desperate for even a tiny trickle of resources, and they kind of meet at the training moment, because it allows global actors, and here I will get critical in studying to run very short term projects and claim to be accomplished in an enormous amount.  And we provide multiple examples of this, not just for HIV/AIDS, but  you'll see a report in the newspapers in Malawi. This wonderful project has transformed the life of this woman, and they always have. This is a PR office, you know, here's the life of Mrs. So and So, who says, "I now grow much more maize, and everything's wonderful." And you read down, read down, down, and they have transformed the lives of again, 5,822 farmers in Dawa district of Malawi. And what have they actually done? They have provided training. They have not provided seeds. They have not provided fertilizer. They have not provided hoes. They have not even...I did run into a  guy who was obsessed with swales, which are ways of carving the soil in these big circles that actually do conserve water. And so no, they are training people, and most of the training is just vacuous. The people getting trained enjoy it because they are people with lot more brain power than they are ever able to use, and so getting kind of what we regard as somewhat Mickey Mouse things. They teach in these HIV trainings gender roles. And it's kind of like what I would teach in soc one. They're gender roles. And then there are gender roles that generate ideals about what's masculine and feminine, but they don't actually teach anything that would be, let's say, practical significance. There's never been any evidence that these trainings change people's HIV behavior, but it allows the global actors to run very short term projects and claim huge results. They do not stick around on the ground. They do not stay there for the long term. They use locals as their beneficiaries. And actually, there's a wonderful book by Monica Krause. You may know it called The Good Project. Okay, She basically, she's got the ultra cynical view, I think, even more simple denying that these big organizations basically market beneficiaries to funders, and they want out of there as soon as they can. They come for six weeks, maybe they do a few trainings, they claim enormous results, and then they're off to some new project in some new district. And just think about that enterprise that you can't get. Imagine that you came to a foundation and you were the new employee on the block, and you're kind of a hot shot, and you're ambitious, and you come in and you say, "Well, I've reviewed the programs, and I think, you know, five out of the six are excellent, and we should sustain them and keep funding the same project." You'd be fired because they always want new projects. They've given them leverage, and they're going to abandon them once they've established them. And people, so short term, I would say, at one level, at least exploitative, however well meant, that is the model project, in you just look at the length and what they actually do on the graph that is the model remote project. 

Joseph Harris  1:08:16

Well, we're so happy to be in this conversation with you here and learning such insight about your work and how you think about it, approach it, going back to what we're talking about before the break. Could you share any, any ripples that you feel, that Fraught Embrace made in the practitioner community?

Ann Swidler  1:08:33

I wish there were ripples. I'll just say...nobody has got in touch with me. Nobody has said, "You know, your work has reshaped our thing." Nobody has said, "Your work is the core of our graduate course, or our graduate, you know, curriculum in development practice or global health or whatever." And I actually think for people who are going to go to Africa to do development work. I think the book is an incredible resource. And it's not that maybe every single thing we said is true or that they have exactly the same experience, but it is so valuable, for example, to understand that the brokers who greet you, who give you your first introduction to the country, have their own experience and their own interests and very often, quite odd use of villagers. So I don't know if maybe a book, but I think it was Maggie Frye who told me that she met this British guy who would come to run, you know, the Wellcome Trust, something, something. And he said, "Do you know that Malawians believe that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS?" And she said, "Where did you hear that?" "Oh, my, you know, host told me, blah, blah, blah.", We did put this in the book. As soon as Susan would meet a new Malawi who didn't know that we already knew the country very well, the first thing they would want to tell us is about the hyena, which is, this is a sexual practice of sexual cleansing that does, or at least did really exist, so women who had had a miscarriage or who were widowed were supposed to have sex with a different man to sort of purge whatever evil forces had, the extra heat in their body. There are different ways of understanding this, and it's, it's common in several African countries, but they were kind of trying to awe and amaze you with their local knowledge. And of course, they're the educated people who got out of the village, went off to the site, who got degrees, who really see the village through their own combination of romantic haze, their grandmother, who's this good villager, but very backward, ignorant, illiterate and believed all these crazy things, and their own ambivalence about their impoverished relatives who are constantly asking for things from them. They feel obligated to to whom they may be having to pay school fees for those people's children. And so it's a little like and we use this, I don't know if you have this, but sort of foolish villager stories, which were part of every immigrant group's cultural heritage. So I'm Jewish, and there's a whole set of film stories that are these famous, famous stories, and they're about how incredibly dumb villagers were, and they're comedic. I mean, they're meant to be comedic, so I think practitioners could learn not only how to positively create better relationships on the ground with local people they're dependent on, but how to create projects that might work better. So I've been talking before about the importance of continuity and longevity in projects. And I think when they realize that you're not going to run away after six weeks, that you're going to be there for the long haul, you get a totally different kind of relationship, as would you if you have, you know, a new person comes to your neighborhood and they're there for six months, you're not going to have your children become best friends with their children because it's going to lead to nowhere. And if they're coming for the, for the loan. So there are all sorts of things that I think would be very, very valuable, including how to manage certain kinds of interpersonal issues and so, but the answer is, I have seen no ripples at all. So think partly all these things have to do with timing. And our book came out just as Trump had become president, and I think that kind of washed away, that his foreign aid might be canceled altogether, written out of the budget. Who's going to go around saying critical things about global public health funding? My god, that's the last thing you want to do. I'm very close friends with Arlie Hochschild, and she had written Strangers in Their Own Land, and it came out like, I think, a month before Trump was elected, and it would have been a very good book. It was focused, actually, on Tea Party, and there was mention of a Trump rally only at the very, very end. But it happened that it came out exactly when Trump was elected, and people were running around with their hair on fire, and they were saying, How could this have happened? Oh my god, here's the Bible, here's the book. And so suddenly, I mean, she laughs, this book that would have been a significant book and would have been reviewed in the New York Times. No question about it, but it suddenly became a massive bestseller. And, you know, so it's a lot of things are also about timing.

Joseph Harris  1:14:12

Sure. Can you say anything about how the findings of that book interacted with the work of other scholars, like, I think of Kim Yi Dionne's wonderful book. 

Ann Swidler  1:14:23

Kim was part of Susan's big projects. I know her very well with her and her kids for a couple of summers in Malawi. And so I really like her, and I love her work, and I know her really well, and I would say she's making a very similar argument in her book to kinds of arguments we make, but I think her position is harsher and more kind of all or nothing. So I just would back up a little bit and say we're not saying all this stuff is stupid and pointless. In fact, we think that the little trickle of resources that flows to villagers in the form of these trainings is one of the only sources of cash they get, and it's incredibly important. And actually, the drying up of those NGO and do gooder projects and the little church groups and stuff during the COVID pandemic has devastated local economies that really was important and valuable. So the per diems, or even some projects, only give them a lunch that has an actual piece of chicken. But these are people who don't get a piece of chicken. They don't have a chicken. So I think, but I would say that the general, you know that it takes a village. Article was co authored with Susan Watkins, so she's, she's part of my pod, yeah. And also she writes really well, and she's got, you know, the Monkey Cage. 

Joseph Harris  1:15:59

Yes, yes.  Sadly, the Monkey Cages actually left the Washington Post. But Kim joined my class a couple times and has mentioned herself lamenting the title of the book, Doomed Interventions, because, yeah, in her view it's too harsh.

Ann Swidler  1:16:19

Again, editors! We were just gonna exactly our book title was The Romance of AIDS Altruism in Africa. No Fraught Embrace. No Romance and Reality. And they fought very hard. They didn't want us to use the word romance at all. And so, you know, they had the romantic view. And our editor felt, "Oh, my God, how can you say you know, funny or critical things about this terrible tragedy and all the people suffering?" And yes, but you weeping and feeling bad and tearing your hair and gnashing your teeth isn't doing anything to help. Sentimentalizing things doesn't do a thing to help. So anyway, yes, I like Kim, and I think our work is fair.

Joseph Harris  1:17:05

It seems to me that's the case too. I'll ask you one last question, and we'll take another break. Could you share a bit about the current work you're doing on global health, and do you see yourself continuing to do research on issues related to global health in the future? 

Ann Swidler  1:17:19

Okay, so I think I have to say that in the work we did for A Fraught Embrace, I got fascinated by the institutions that did work, that didn't collapse the minute external support was withdrawn. So not the little CBOs and NGO projects that created little committees that voted, but two vibrant, important institutional systems that are critical to Malawi and social life, and that is religious congregations and chieftaincy, chiefs. So I've been obsessed with religion in Malawi and with chiefs and chieftaincy. And I've been very, very interested in how the two interact, because each of them tries to provide various forms of public goods, so that would be the relation to health. So for example, it's because the chief tells people they have to get their children vaccinated, that they get vaccinated, and it's if the chief tells them they have to do X or Y. So how that form of authority works, and what their churches do or don't do. And so this is another place for culture and institutions and the vitality and groundedness of institutions and their capacity to keep working. The existence of, let's say, good institutions really matters. So that's at a theoretical level, the broad connection between most of what I've been doing now and what I did before, as I'll explain when I give this talk, the specific thing on the HIV clinics was something of an accident and probably something of a one shot effort, although, as I'll explain at the end of the talk, my mind is bursting with new ideas or more work that could be done. But I did do another project because I was supposed to go to Malawi in the summer of 2020, as you might imagine, that did not happen, but I already had a little grant, and I had to quickly figure I wanted my, first I didn't want to waste money, but I wanted to make sure it got to my people on the ground in Malawi who were suddenly devastated by drying up whatever little bit of tourism. Then there were no government workshops, and there was no nothing. And so I cooked up a different project, which was kind of ironic. Oh, and you couldn't interview anyone face to face. Now, all these, you know, tremendous precautions through human subjects. So I cooked up a project that could be done entirely by mobile phone, so no one ever interacted with anyone, including the project coordinator guy. And it was to through basically snowball same point, find chiefs, pastors, chefs and some other local authorities, like the governor of the market, the person actually organizes the open air, huge markets. Were they insisting that people sanitize their hands before they came into the market? Were people wearing masks? Were the churches holding their services outdoors?

Joseph Harris  1:20:54

All right, so we're back with Ann Swidler, a sociologist of culture and institutions and religion. And the final set of questions that I have for you relate to your work as a researcher, what would you say are the most meaningful parts of the research process to you?

Ann Swidler  1:21:14

Well, well, I guess, like any researcher, but maybe more for me, it's both the human connections you form. So I think I said earlier, or maybe I said it in our informal chat, that I think it's really hard to understand how a society works if you're not trying to get something done, and that just the disinterested observer who's watching and trying not to interfere with anything so that nothing could possibly contaminate the data, then you don't also find out why people can't get things done, or which kind of informal connections you need to actually have something happen.  So I won't go into the whole long story, but we were once trying to get a young man who had come to visit our project but had gotten on the wrong flight from the airport in the capital of Malawi to our little rural place without having him take a bus late at night from the bus station, which was quite a seedy, maybe dangerous place, and the Malawian we had deputed to go up and try to meet his plane and find him, missed him. She found out from the taxi drivers what taxi he'd gotten into. She called the taxi company. She found the right taxi driver and started calling the phone, but the taxi driver didn't pick up because he didn't recognize the number. But she knew someone who knew the dispatcher right? And she got the dispatcher to put a call through to the guy who said to the American visitor, a woman is trying to reach you. And the American said, "No, no, you know I'm driving around. Don't know where I am. I'm terrified, and I certainly don't want to talk to some woman." And she got him, she got the dispatcher to contact me and patch me through to him. I mean, it was and it was all through exchanges of favors and network ties. So then, when I try to understand why certain things don't happen in public health, and you realize how dependent people are on these networks, and you can tell them you must do your job this way. You must not hire this person just because he's a friend of your friend. You must do X. But there, you understand how embedded people are in a way that if you weren't trying to get something done, it would never come up in interviews, because this isn't something they talk about. It's how they organize things. So I just, I could give you a million other examples like that, where things just don't happen unless you find the person who finds the person who knows how to get it done. And my husband just recently showed me an article that was about, I think, Tanzania, and it was a very simple thing, which is, what happens with wrong numbers. And it turns out that in that study, 15% of the people who got calls that were wrong numbers managed to make a direct contact with that wrong number and develop some kind of interchange, because having more people whom you know in random places who, if you needed something you know, to call that person, or you have some exchange of favors, or some potential exchange of favors or information, nothing could be more valuable. So one of the reasons I always think it's hilarious that human subjects is so worried about consent is that everyone love to talk to you. You can't, I mean, beat them off with a stick. I have never had anybody who didn't want to talk to me because they don't know what this connection might lead to there, and not just me, my interviewers, and then I'll stop. But there was a study of HIV prevalence in 2002 or something in Botswana. It's called the bias, b i a s, or b, a, i, s, I can never remember. And I saw that - the what's it called - the rate of people who said yes to being interviewed, the response rate was 98%, and I thought, well, that that is bullshit, that can't be a legitimate study. They just lied or whatever. And now that I've done research in Africa, 98% response rate seems perfectly reasonable. People just do not say no. So I guess that's one set of things, the informal ties and the trying to get something done, and then I would say, and this is true for every researcher, but it's just much more true. It's just those moments of revelatory discovery where you understand something in a way you just had not grasped before. And that has been especially exciting because I'm studying Africa, which is not my place of origin, and because I've been studying a lot of health things, but I think being well, I'll just say I would advise young scholars, whatever research you're doing in whatever country, whatever method, keep a rich journal of your research experience. This helps you remember why you decided to measure something this way, not that way, what question wording you rejected versus decided to go forward with. And hopefully, whatever kind of study it is, this will lead you to [places] that you didn't expect, and it's often I remember my husband again's Claude Fisher, and he was doing this huge network study in Northern California, and he came home and said that one of the people they were interviewing broke down during the interviewing, and it turned out she was taking care of her elderly father, and she had basically quit her job in order - there was no one else to take care of him. She was, I think, in her early 50s, and she said, "I have no friends. I have no one." You know, well, this is the kind of thing that, even in a big survey with quantitative this and that - things will leak around the edges, and instead of trying to push those things away and say, Oh, that's getting in the way of the data, you know, do we have to turn this into human subjects because somebody's gotten upset about a very neutral set of questions about How many people do you see socially, and who do you go to if you want to talk about a problem, and who do you have dinner with, and so forth? For this woman, answering those questions had just been made her realize how isolated she'd become. And I just think those moments of insight that come from paying attention around the edges of whatever you're doing as well as to whatever your central focus is, are invaluable, and they're fun.  

Joseph Harris  1:28:46

Sure, I love those moments in my own research that sort of what gets me out of bed. Yeah, I was curious how work outside the discipline of sociology informs your work.

Ann Swidler  1:29:10

I would say I have an extremely eclectic way of absorbing knowledge, which is, I don't tend to keep up on all the journals. I'm really not able to read all the most important recent literature, but I am attentive to whole array of things that accidentally come into my purview. So for example, recently, I've been really fascinated by it's not just one person, it's a whole bunch of people in political science who are starting to study institutional legacies of earlier forms of government, sometimes of pre-colonial forms. So this often has to do with geocoding, or at least geographically sensitive work about where there were kingdoms just second. James Robinson at Chicago has a couple of papers on the Kuba kingdom in Congo, and it turns out that where the Kuba kingdom was versus right outside its borders, such as they were. You get really different patterns of current, contemporary social organization, the ability of people to mobilize and create collective goods. They've done experiments with doing the same sort of public goods game on one side versus the other side of where and so. And there's a lot of people starting to really pay attention to the idea that there are very enduring institutional legacies. My brilliant colleague in political science, Martha Wilfahrt at Berkeley, she has stuff on similar findings from Senegal, really fascinating work, and she's done a review of literature in political science or something on this question. And I would say nobody yet really has figured out a mechanism. So you understand that how governance was done 200 years ago actually affects local governance Now, despite the colonial period and all sorts of new introduction of different rules and different administrative structures and this and that, and yet, there appear to be these continuities. And why? Why? So she has an argument that there are recognized, sometimes fictive, but recognized clan, clan relations among some village heads and elders and other influentials that make cooperation overcoming collective action problems more possible. So that's one mechanism. But what is the best explanation of this? It's just hugely provocative for me. It is really interesting for suggesting sort of some kind of deep cultural legacies that structure the way institutions work. So I'm back to my institutions and culture. So that's an example of work that has been really stimulating to me. I read quite a bit when I can find it in political science, like Kathy Thelen's work on institutions, how institutions evolve. And again, I feel both that this work is incredibly stimulating to me and it also suggests that there was something that we don't fully understand. So I find the work incredibly impressive. They collect more data and have more systematic understanding. But it's also incredibly intriguing because I feel like there's kind of a theoretical opportunity there for trying to understand what the plausible mechanisms of such very enduring continuities could be. Should we think about it as identities? Should we think about it as actual social ties? Which I think is little bit what Martha Wilfahrd is going for. Should we think of it as quote, norms, which is a totally sociologically frustrating term, but I think some people have thought of it as sort of enduring norms. And none of that has exactly satisfied me. Should we think of it - for instance, I don't think they're suggesting this as social imaginary, sort of the way the Holy Roman Empire continued to influence the way European states thought about what they were and what they were doing long after the actual Empire had disappeared, but it was like the again, kind of historical imaginary was shaped by these experiences. So I don't know what it is, but that's the kind of literature that if I had all the time in the world, I would spend even more time reading.

Joseph Harris  

That's so interesting. I feel like our disciplines often tells us to look inward and to, as you say, scour the literature, to know the latest research in our own field and and yet, I hear this deep appreciation from you of the scholarly enterprise in other disciplines and the way that they're really carefully interrogating these issues and the applications it has for sociology.

Ann Swidler  

And actually, I think this is another advantage of...so, of course, everybody wants to tell you how to be exactly like them and rather than exactly like themselves, but I think it has been good for me to be a very disciplinarily focused and trained scholar. But once I got interested in Africa, I was interested in all the scholarship, if it had the word Africa, I was interested so, for example, in economics, there are a whole bunch of institutional economists now, and many of them do study Africa. So my colleague, Ted Miguel, for example, has done amazing work on how national ideologies can overcome the tendency of greater ethnic fragmentation to reduce public goods, and he's shown that that does happen in Kenya, but right across the border, in Tanzania, it does not happen because Tanzania has a very strong pan-Africanist and nationalist heritage. So it's like this law, let's say in political science, which is, the greater ethnic fragmentation you have, the lower the level of public goods you have, which is true in his Kenyan data, and he even understands why it's true. He's got really good data. This is an old paper. It's not his current work. I love that paper, or stuff by Daniel Posner. Posner, who was at UCLA, he went to Harvard, and I think he's gone back to UCLA, but anyway, he's another political scientist, and he did this wonderful paper on why ethnicity matters and causes more conflict in Malawi than in Zambia, where the exact same ethnic groups are on both sides of the border, and they actually move back and forth and are, you know, the Chewa and the Tumbuka. And I don't know if the Yao, but anyway, Chewa and Tumbuka identities really matter very differently to Zambians than they do to Malawians, and he's got a wonderful analysis of why that's true. So it's like being interested in Africa allowed me to assimilate things from many more disciplines. Needless to say, I also read a lot of anthropology when anthropologists stop talking about abstruse theory and the rhizomes of something or other and actually talk about concrete observations of the real world.

Joseph Harris  

That's wonderful. Last question for you, and you've already spoken to this a bit in your call for graduate students to be careful in carrying journals with them...

Ann Swidler  

Or they can write in their computers every night, which is just more efficient.

Joseph Harris 

But if you were to give first year PhD students doing work on global health one piece of advice, what would it be?

Ann Swidler  

I'm tempted to say, "Come to Malawi!" And in fact, I would love anybody who's really interested in coming to Malawi get in touch with me. But I guess I would say, "Get involved with real people in the real world, in whatever place you're studying, and don't just talk to bureaucrats. Don't just hang around the policy influentials. Don't just hang around the capital city. Find a way, whether it's letting which people will do at least, I'm sure in Africa, maybe in Latin America, I'm not sure, let them take you home to meet their relatives. Find and yes, that will entail obligations, and you'll be expected...whatever. But if you don't get a sense of life on the ground, you'll just misapprehend an enormous amount of what's happening, and it does lead to mistakes. I mean, I give you this is not about first year graduate students, but it's just about how the frameworks we come to problems with just turn out to not make much sense. So in the attempt to improve maternal health, which was one of the big, you know, Sustainable Development Goals, Millennium Development Goals, countries, this is again, the way this global public health tension gets focused. So this was an MDG, so everybody was, you know, really trying to figure out maternal health, maternal health. So in Malawi, they basically tried to say, we're going to mandate that women give birth in clinics or hospitals and not at home in their villages. And they knew enough to use chiefs to enforce this. So chiefs are now expected to force women in their villages to give birth at hospitals or clinics and not in the village, and they can find them. I've forgotten if it's five chickens, but it's something very, very substantial in local terms, if they fail to do this, and this has created enormous difficulties because women are many, many kilometers away from these hospitals and clinics. They often go a month or two before and basically squat on the grounds of the hospital because they're so and so you go to the hospital, you see all these little people with their cooking fires out there, squatting in the mud waiting to give birth because they're afraid to give birth in their villages. I mean, so again, if you this sounds like such a good idea, and it probably is, at some level, a good idea, and it may even have reduced maternal mortality, I don't actually know the answer there, but not understanding what the context is. And you just can't understand the context sitting in some bureaucrat's office in the capital city. And also, if you can get yourself abroad, and there are many, many little fellowship programs that will allow you to go abroad and actually get into the field. And as they say, get your hands dirty. It may be your taxi driver. It may be the, you know, I had one of my most wonderful experiences rooming with a Malawian colleague, and she and I were sharing a bedroom for five days. And you know, it was fantastic. I learned incredible things by being kind of stuck with her. So don't be shy.

Joseph Harris  

Wonderful advice. Ann Swidler, it's been an honor and a pleasure.

Ann Swidler  

It was my pleasure. So thank you very, very much, Joe. Thank you. All right.



This transcription produced with the assistance of Cenyao Xiong.